Blackberry Z30 gets November local launch date, HTC mum on local release

We previously reported on how the Blackberry Z30 is now official. Good news is that it’s set for South Africa as well, the not so good news is that only Vodacom has confirmed to carry the device locally (at time this post was published) with a launch date of ‘November 2013′. There are 30 days in November, so hey, it could be anytime then.

Not so giant HTC has -yesterday- in a press release announced a giant addition to it’s One family; the HTC One Max: an enlarged version of the original One that boosts the size of the 1080p LCD panel up to 5.9 inches while attempting to keep the One’s classy aluminum look and feel. This attempt is made regardless of the impact on general portability — the One Max weighs 217 grams and is over 16 centimeters long and 10.3mm thick, thanks in part to the front-facing BoomSound speakers. And the phablet only gets platter as it contains a bendy 1,200mAh battery to add to the capacity of the built-in (and non-removable) 3,300mAh battery.

Aside from its size, the One Max brings other big changes, including a fingerprint scanner on its rear side. We’ve had the chance to use the scanner and, while it isn’t as neat as the iPhone 5s’s, it does the basic job of letting you log in with a swipe of your fingertip. We’d have happily swapped it out for optical stabilization on the UltraPixel camera, however.

The back cover is now removable, letting you expand the 16GB or 32GB of onboard storage with up to 64GB more via microSD — a feature that was missing on the One and on the One X before that. The One Max sticks with a Snapdragon 600 (with 2GB of RAM) for processing, rather than the superior Snapdragon 800 used in rival devices like the Sony Xperia Z Ultra and Samsung Galaxy Note 3. HTC says global availability will start rolling out as early as this week. As always, we’ll keep you updated on the local release on both these devices, that’s if we hear something.

Author Description

Papi Mabele

Tech enthusiast at heart. Lover of all things digital. Papi is the founder of SA Vibe and has been sharing his love for gadgetry since 2010. Papi sees no need for wearable tech in his busy schedule and considers the Xbox One as non existant. He may come across as bias at times, and still holds a grudge at BlackBerry for creating the 8520.